Classic lemon gets squeezed at derby
Staff writer
Levi Wiggins sat beneath the shade of a weathered school bus that looked more like a “Mad Max” film prop than something still fit for the road.
Wearing flip-flops, khaki shorts, and a smudged orange T-shirt, he sipped from a water bottle and found reprieve from the 98°F day on a lawn chair.
About 150 feet away, a red-and-white 1959 Ford Edsel Ranger gleamed in the late-July Kansas sun, its original chrome trim polished with the words “LEVI,” “Team Thirsty,” and “HalFasst Racing” painted across its front and rear fenders.
Wiggins hadn’t driven the classic from Herington to the Marion County Fair in Hillsboro to show it off Saturday. He’d come to wreck one of Ford’s biggest flops.
The Edsel was one of two entries in a newly added relic class at this year’s demolition derby, which concluded the county fair. More than 30 cars were battered, bent, and left disabled in the muddied arena.
Some people gave Wiggins and owner Jake Sigel grief for entering the Edsel in the derby.
Produced for only three model years, the Edsel became one of the automotive industry’s biggest failures after poor sales during a recession and a string of marketing blunders doomed the brand. Still, only 2,451 four-door hardtops, like the one Wiggins drove, were built in 1959.
“It’s just going to rust in a cornfield anyway,” Wiggins said with a laugh.
It would cost an eager collector, he estimated, around $200,000 to restore it to like-new condition.
Saturday made any dream of restoration even more expensive.
Waiting across the arena sat the Edsel’s executioner: a 1963 Lincoln Continental driven by Wiggins’ longtime friend, Matt Druse. Like the Edsel, the Lincoln belonged to Sigel.
Once a green flag waved, the two relics met nose-first in the middle of the mud.
A crunch here, and the Edsel’s bumper folded in.
Another crunch there, and its back bumper fell off. After a few more good thuds, the car’s front and back ends were barely recognizable — looking more like a battered red lunchbox than an automobile.
For nine minutes, the aging cars slammed, shoved, and lurched around the arena until, finally, the Edsel stopped revving.
It had run for the last time.
“We’ll just scrap it,” Wiggins said afterward. “Strip what we want to keep out of it, and scrap it.”
Competition quickly gave way to three decades of friendship in the pits, where Wiggins and Druse laughed together after climbing from their battered cars, sweaty and sore.
“Just two old friends, and one dumb friend that just keeps f***ing footing the bill, just because he like to see s**t tore up but doesn’t like to hurt himself in the process,” Druse said with a playful grin, nodding toward Wiggins and Sigel.
As far as the cars, they may not run again. As far as Wiggins and Druse, they’ll feel the bashing for a couple of days.
“We’re both going to feel it tonight, tomorrow,” Wiggins said.
But Wiggins said he’ll be glad he did it as long as they keep the class in the derby.
“If they’ll keep the class around, we’ll do it again,” he said.